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individual units which make the nation. There is no one-man power, no ministerial power, no money power, no specious but fallacious philosophy, going to rule this country. This is a democracy-discussion and native energy will point that way.

The educational purpose of America is sharply distinguished from that of other lands. The essential factor in the differentiation is our democracy.

AMERICANS AS OPTIMISTS

We have got hold of all that and more. We may learn from all other systems, but there is an essential educational purpose in America which distinguishes our system from all others. We know nothing about classes. We stand for the equal opportunity for all. Even more-much more. It is the natural belief that the greatness of the nation and the progress of mankind depend upon encouraging and aiding every child of the people to make the most of himself, without fear of consequences, and without doubt of results of the very highest moment to the nation and to the world.

All Americans are optimists. There may be a few stopping with us who are not, but they are not Americans. The expectations of the nation are not to be measured. Our expectations are not gross. They are genuine and sincere, moral and highminded. They are to be realized through the universal, popular enlightenment. The nation believes implicitly in the essential principles established in the great charters of English and American liberty. It is using its money and its political power for the fullest development of those great principles. It is doing it with judgment, with confidence and without apprehension. With fearless self-initiative, with self-conscious rectitude, with ready acceptance of the logical consequences of its own progress, with malice toward none and charity for all, with no thought of conquest, with no purpose but liberty, security and intellectual and moral progress in its mind, with knowledge that all real progress must come through work and all real growth must come through service, the nation once more pays its respects to the past and gives. itself anew for the future.

THE IMMIGRANT CHILD

MISS JULIA RICHMAN, DISTRICT SUPT. OF SCHOOLS NEW YORK CITY

URS is a nation of immigrants. The

OURS

citizen voter of to-day was the immigrant child of yesterday. He may be the political leader of to-morrow. Between the voter of to-day and the immigrant child of yesterday stands the school. The school alone can make of the immigrant the material upon which the future welfare of the state and the nation is based. Careful examination of the statistics of the bureau of immigration shows, first, that no census of children of school age among the arriving immigrants is taken; second, that thousands of immigrant children of school age never enter our schools; and, third, that

about nine per cent. of immigrant arrivals are of school age. That there has never been any coördination between the immigration and the school authorities is a governmental blunder which needs immediate correction.

The immigrant child of prior schooling should be properly graded, not according to his knowledge of English, but according to his mentality. Special classes for foreigners, as a means to an end, not as an end in itself, must be established in all communities where foreigners congregate.

The Americanization of the child, while the parents remain foreign in

thought, language, and custom, means domestic shipwreck. The school must give to the parents correct American standards. In order to acquaint parents as well as children with a respect for the law, we must change our methods of teaching civics. A community needs knowledge of local ordinances before it needs to know the divisions of the national government. Foreigners should be taught the laws which were made for their protection. It is far more essential that they should be taught to obey tenement house laws, to keep fire escapes clear, and to separate ashes from garbage than to memorize the qualifications of a United States senator or to name the members of the President's cabinet.

We must recognize that pedagogy based solely upon theory has outlived its usefulness. Abstract educational theories must stand aside to make room for sociological experiences. The sociological needs of a community must be examined and closely studied by educators and the causes thereof must be scientifically

traced. In the removal of these causes the school will find its chief function, its chief obligation to the community. Sociology and pedagogy must be harmoniously blended would we truly serve the state and the nation. With this ideal before them, the training schools for teachers must revise their methods.

A teacher's life, if viewed with the eyes of the optimist, is one of glorious opportunity; to the pessimist it is one of hopeless drudgery. With you it still rests either to make your teaching a work of hopeless drudgery or of unlimited opportunity. Nowhere is that opportunity so rich, so fruitful, and so soul-satisfying as in a community of aliens. In all classes of the community there is much of God's work to be done. In the large immigrant communities this is especially true. Let us give ourselves to the task of serving the state, humanity, and God. Ours is the great opportunity of rendering the rare and holy services of making a true American citizen out of an immigrant child.

THE SCHOOL ASPECT OF COMPULSORY EDUCATION

G. H. MARTIN, SECRETARY MASSACHUSETTS STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION

IN all ages and among all peoples is found that the motive of the parent is

men have talked much of their own rights and of children's duties; we are beginning to reverse the terms and assert children's rights and men's duties. It is not creditable to modern civilization or modern Christianity that, after seventyfive years of fighting the wholesale exploitation of child labor in mines and mills, we should still find the enemy in possession of so many entrenched positions and defending them so successfully.

Wherever we find children denied prematurely their right to time and instruction we find the primary cause the ignorance and the selfishness of the parents. In every investigation into child labor it.

to relieve himself from labor. There is evidence that as the proportion of the family income derived from the labor of children increases the earnings of the father decrease.

Whatever may be true in the country and on the farms, it is certain that in factory towns where child labor is depended upon for family support race suieide is delayed. To this crime against childhood the parent is tempted by the greed of employers. They furnish the opportunity which in the North has drawn as by magnet attraction the poor and ignorant peasants of Canada and Southern Europe, and in the South the

equally poor and ignorant mountain whites. Against this conspiracy between employer and parent the child is helpless. Only society, by means of laws carefully drawn and rigidly enforced, can secure him his rights. To such legislation and to such enforcement society is drawn by its own interest and compelled by its highest obligation. Mercantile interests can look out for themselves, but the children must be protected by the State.

The time given to children to call their own in which to equip themselves for the battle of life in the most advanced communities has reached a maximum of fourteen years. This is low enough for any community, and wherever there is a lower limit all the social forces should

combine to raise it. In fourteen years a child of even moderate ability in a community which furnishes adequate school facilities should have acquired a good elementary education, broad enough and thorough enough for him to build upon by voluntary effort such superstructure of more advanced culture as he is inclined to. This may easily be shown by a brief analysis of the modern elementary school course.

The child has a right to be taught how to be useful and to be increasingly useful as he grows in strength and intelligence. He has a right to know the pleasure of service and to feel the obligation. of service. He has a right to have some place made for him in the industrial life of the family.

THE

THE LEGAL ASPECT OF COMPULSORY EDUCATION

F. H. GIDDINGS, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

'HE educational problem and the industrial problem of child labor cannot be separated. Child labor itself is a kind of education, which, according to its nature and extent, may be consistent or altogether inconsistent with other kinds. The labor that American boys and girls had to perform on the farm a generation and more ago was often an invaluable discipline of mind and character, fitting them for self-reliant and useful careers quite as effectively as their meagre school training did. Such labor did not necessarily unfit the child for the enjoyment of the highest educational advantages. Exhausting confinement in stores, sweat shops and factories is child labor of an altogether different sort. It is antagonistic to the child's mental and physical development and it cannot be combined with any sound educational policy.

It is not easy to maintain the administrative machinery to enforce child labor restrictions and the truancy laws. Ex

perience has shown that compulsory attendance is itself the best enforcement of the laws against child labor; but this is difficult where school accommodations are inadequate and where population is either dense and heterogeneous, as in the tenement house quarters of our great cities, or sparse and indifferent to educational interests, as in the mountain regions of the South.

A very special difficulty, and one that puts all our theories and our devices to the severest test, is that which is presented by destitute families. The practical question which has to be answered over and over is: Is it right to take a strong, overgrown boy thirteen years of age from money earning employment and force him to attend school when by so doing we compel a widowed mother to apply to private or public relief agencies for help, thereby making her, and perhaps the boy also, a pauper?

The only answer to this question con

sistent with the policy of compulsory education itself is the proposition that in such cases adequate public assistance should be given, not as charity, but as a right.

A final and deeper difficulty exists, which has received curiously little attention. We hear a great deal lately about "race suicide." Large families are no longer seen, especially in the so-called middle class. It is strange that no one has pointed out the connection between the increased demand upon parents to maintain their children in school, foregoing the earnings that children might add to the family income, and the diminishing size of the average family. The connection, however, is undoubtedly a real one, and the practical inference is obvious. If the restriction of child labor is desirable; if compulsory education is desirable; and if at the same time large

families also are desirable; the state must make up to the family at least some part of the income that children could earn if they were permitted freely to enter upon industrial employments. The question, therefore, that we shall have to face and to answer, is this: Shall the state pay parents for keeping their children in school, between the ages of ten and fourteen? This would be a policy of socialism, undoubtedly. I do not pretend to say whether the American people will or will not adopt it. I only say that as a matter of social causation they will be compelled to adopt it, if they try to maintain both large families and compulsory education, while prohibiting child labor in department stores and factories. It is not my intention to advocate the measure, or to argue against it. My purpose is served in calling your attention to the logic of facts.

MANUAL TRAINING IN THE GRADES

SUPT. L. D. HARVEY, MENOMONIE, WIS.

NOUGH crimes have already been com

mitted in the educational world under the name of correlation without still further extending the list in attempting to correlate every form of motor training with some phase of the text book of the school

room.

Correlation in educational work should be natural and not forced. Indeed, it cannot be forced; and much of what goes under the name of correlation would better be called a conglomeration of disjointed and unrelated fragments of knowledge with a resulting habit of mind of little value in effective and concentrated effort.

I believe the children being trained today are far more concerned with the industrial processes of to-day than they are with the industrial processes of primitive peoples, and I cannot bring myself to the

belief that nature has made so great a mistake as to bring children into the world at any given stage of the development of civilization lacking the capacity

enter into that civilization without going through all the preliminary processes and steps through which it has been evolved.

I am not undertaking to argue the question as to whether the child in his unfolding must live over again in his development the development of the race, and must begin where the race began; but I do undertake to express my belief that if this be true, he is at the time he enters the public school advanced far enough in this process of development so that some systematic effort may be undertaken for his training through the utilization of his immediate environment, and that it is unnecessary to attempt the diffi

cult task of reconstructing the environment of primitive peoples which finds no proper place in the environment of to-day.

We have been making the mistake in our public school work of assuming that the child can be taken from the home, where its activities before entering school have been concerned chiefly with things, and that during the school period each day we may entirely change the form of his activities and invoke the activities which come from the use of books.

He should have during these early years just such scope for motor activity and systematic training as a well organized course in manual training will provide.

And many of those who make these complaints, doubtless with more or less of truth, argue that what is needed in the

public schools is fewer rather than more subjects, and that manual training would only add to the burdens of teachers and pupils, and would detract from the quality and quantity of knowledge and kind of training to be derived from the study of the traditional three R's in the course of study.

The remarkable thing about these claims is that they are made just as frequently and with just as much truth where no work in manual training or

The trouble is not that we have too other of the so-called "fads" is found. many subjects, but that we attempt to teach too many things in these subjects which are not worth teaching, and are wasteful in time, method, and effort with correspondingly poor results.

I

WHY DO SO MANY PUPILS LEAVE THE HIGH SCHOOL?
REUBEN POST HALLECK, PRINCIPAL BOYS' HIGH SCHOOL, LOUISVILLE, KY.

THINK secondary schools do their work as well as any other department of education. In some of our large cities fifty per cent. of all enrolled pupils do not get beyond the fourth grade. This is an appalling fact which ought to alarm any nation whose foundation rests on education. Those of us who are entrusted with secondary education must in the future try to make two blades of grass grow in the high school where one has grown before.

High school teaching is not a profession. In some states the average length of a high school teacher's continuance in the business of teaching is not over four years. No profession can secure good results on such an average of length of service, no matter whether it is the medical, engineering, chemical, or teaching profession. Under existing conditions we must expect withdrawals from school and untold misdirected and wasted human effort.

An average of less than twenty per cent. of the boys entering the high schools of the United States remain to graduate, although naturally the average for girls and for most smaller cities and towns is larger. The Boys' High School of Louisville has by improving its teaching force graduated during the last six years an average of nearly thirty-eight per cent. of all boys entering. It is not so much the subject as the teacher that causes pupils to lose interest and withdraw. Something more is needed than enrichment of the course to prevent withdrawals. Enrichment of the high school course does not always enrich the pupil. In high schools with utilitarian courses the percentage of pupils leaving is often higher than in classical high schools.

There will be fewer withdrawals f teachers will give sympathetic outside attention to a pupil the moment he begins to fall behind; if they will remember that incoming pupils are very immature, that

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